Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Morteza Hajizadeh
Guest: Dr. Moritz Föllmer, Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Amsterdam
Episode: “The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History” (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Date: January 9, 2026

Overview

This episode delves into Moritz Föllmer’s recent book, The Quest for Individual Freedom: A Twentieth-Century European History, which explores how the concept and practice of individual freedom evolved across twentieth-century Europe. Föllmer challenges linear narratives about the rise or decline of individuality, instead emphasizing tensions, paradoxes, and competing visions of freedom as they played out in times of war, peace, dictatorship, colonialism, and social change. The discussion ranges from philosophical underpinnings to concrete historical episodes, highlighting how ordinary people navigated the shifting boundaries of personal liberty against the backdrop of collective agendas.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Scope of the Book

• Inception: Föllmer became interested over two decades ago in understanding individuality across twentieth-century upheavals. After a book on Berlin, he broadened his scope to a pan-European lens, considering colonial contexts as well.
• Synopsis: The book surveys ordinary Europeans’ persistent, often adverse, pursuit of personal freedom, how it clashed or intertwined with ambitious collective projects, and the impact of wars, dictatorships, and decolonization.
  • Quote:

    "This quest for individual freedom played out across an entire century and across an entire continent, plus all the colonial spaces. … Individual freedom was also invested with enormously ambitious political agendas."
    (C, 03:56)

2. Challenging Teleological Narratives

• Föllmer critiques commonly-accepted stories of the “rise” or “decline” of individuality as simplistic, arguing such arguments ignore that freedom and individuality mean different things to different people.
  • Quote:

    "It's very difficult to say that it either rose or declined... What's more interesting is this interplay between different notions, different versions of this quest for individual freedom."
    (C, 08:06)

3. Philosophical Foundations: Georg Simmel and Isaiah Berlin

• Simmel: Stressed freedom as a matter of degree, with both subjective and objective dimensions.
• Berlin: His distinction between negative and positive freedom is useful, but must be expanded to account for other constraints (bureaucracy, gender norms, etc.).

  • Quote:

    "Freedom is a matter of degrees. It's not about saying people are free or they're unfree. They might be free in certain respects and to some extent, and might not be free in other respects."
    (C, 10:05)

  • Quote:

    "Defining freedom against something was what brought me to reread Isaiah Berlin... But my take on it is that it's expandable."
    (C, 13:23)

4. War as Both Constraint and Opportunity

• World Wars: Created mass constraints (conscription, forced labor), but also paradoxically opened new spaces—especially for women—to assert independence or economic freedom.
  • Examples include women leaving agrarian jobs for factories or running farms themselves.
  • Discourse on women’s sexual and economic freedoms often spun into anxieties about loss of moral control or punitive backlash, e.g., head-shaving in postwar France.
  • Quote:

    "Wars do impose enormous constraints... But they also create disorder. So they open up unexpected spaces of opportunity."
    (C, 17:07)

5. Clashing Visions: State, Social Democracy, and Neoliberalism

• In the twentieth century, no single concept of freedom prevailed.
  • Social democracy sought to expand freedom via the welfare state—education, housing, social reforms (e.g., Swedish divorce laws)—but standardization inevitably limited individualized responses.
  • Neoliberalism critiqued the welfare state as stifling, advocating for less state control and more “personal initiative.”
  • These tensions remain relevant as right-wing populists invoke an unmediated, sometimes aggrieved, understanding of personal liberty.
  • Quote:

    “The welfare state standardizes... expanding the scope for individual freedom for everyone, but with a necessarily standardized sort of system.”
    (C, 25:57)

  • Memorable Moment:
    Discussion of “offended freedom” and COVID-era resistance (C, 29:59).

6. Work: Constraint and Source of Liberation

• Industrialization changed experiences of freedom; factory work, though regulated and disciplinarian, could be more liberating than servitude or agrarian dependency for some groups—demonstrating the contextual, relative nature of freedom.
  • Quote:

    "Freedom is a matter of degrees... If you place yourself in the position of a maid... she looked out of the window, saw the factory girls... thought these are free young women and I'm not."
    (C, 35:04)

7. Post-War Moral Shifts and Cold War Dynamics

• Liberation after WWII was initially experienced as a unison of collective and individual freedom, though quickly became fraught over black markets, gender relations, and the new Cold War divide.
  • Western freedom as a Cold War construct; ongoing debates over whether individual choice (e.g., shopping in East Berlin) undermined collective solidarity.
  • Later, the peace movement questioned whether consumption-based freedom was meaningful under the threat of nuclear war.
  • Quote:

    "The end of the Second World War brought an enormous relief... collective national liberation and individual individual liberation going in tandem."
    (C, 40:42)

8. Transgressive Selfhood and the Limits of Liberation

• Artistic and countercultural movements pushed boundaries of self-expression and autonomy, often embracing drug use and sexual liberation.
• These freedoms sometimes proved self-destructive or morally fraught—e.g., the normalization of relationships once viewed as transgressive (child-adult sexuality), eventually rejected from within progressive circles.
• Feminist and social critiques revealed unintended harms, reinforcing that expanding freedom for one group may harm another.
  • Quote:

    "Transgression... for a while had quite a lot of traction... But the feminist critique also had really had an impact by the 1980s... imposes a completely unacceptable cost on children."
    (C, 51:45)

9. Colonialism, Decolonization, and Competing Notions of Freedom

• Colonizers often claimed a sense of expanded personal liberty in the colonies while denying self-determination to the colonized, asserting that freedom was “granted” and thus completed.
• Anti-colonial activists redefined freedom, emphasizing liberation from the legacies of slavery and discrimination, sometimes finding more real freedom abroad than under colonial rule at home.
  • Quote:

    "Colonialism... comes with a notion of European freedom... communicated to the colonizers, is often communicated in a way that says you are already free because we have abolished slavery, we have liberated you and now you're free, so you don't have any further claim..."
    (C, 54:10)

10. Contemporary Echoes and Constitutional Safeguards

• From the 1990s onward, the ideological “vacuum” post-Cold War was initially filled by neoliberal individualism; recently, new forms of collective threat (war, inequality, racism) are reasserting constraints on freedom.
• Föllmer observes that the tension between collective projects and individual quests for liberty is permanent and often productive—but that most people will accept limitations on others’ freedoms as long as their own feel safe.
  • Quote:

    “These constitutional safeguards, so it seems, have long been accepted and maybe for other reasons, not so much because people were so invested in them... Many people might feel freer, even though for large sectors of society the opposite is the case.”
    (C, 71:04)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It's a very powerful idea to think that the individual rises. That's usually a critical narrative... But it's also very powerful to say, well, individuality becomes ever weaker because... there are huge bureaucracies, political regimes that become more demanding.” (C, 07:01)

• “Freedom is very often defined against something. … If one takes something for granted, then it's usually seen as a natural freedom.” (C, 12:31)

• "Wars do impose enormous constraints… But they also create disorder. So they open up unexpected spaces of opportunity." (C, 17:07)

• “Although that is a form of negative freedom in the sense that if there's no state supporting them, working class people are dependent on the capitalist economy... if that can be changed through more progressive education, a welfare state, then that frees people.” (C, 24:18)

• “Any broader political project entails some kind of collective promise... But it’s dependent for its energy… on that securing peace and order by repression, oppressive means, that is an option. … But the especially also… Nazi Germany was… trying to appeal to people's sense of individual freedom by saying… we liberate you from moral constraints. … you can be freer. … But now here… you have freedom to do what you want.” (C, 67:56)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:52] – Föllmer’s background and book genesis
• [06:53] – Challenging “rise or decline” narratives of individuality
• [09:56] – Simmel, Berlin, and analyzing freedom as subjective, relative, and oppositional
• [14:54] – War, propaganda, paradoxes of constraint and independence (especially for women)
• [22:12] – Economic freedom, social democracy vs neoliberal visions
• [34:43] – Industrialization, work as constraint and source of new independence
• [40:40] – Post-WWII societies, Cold War, shifts in meaning of “liberated life”
• [47:05] – “Transgressive selfhood,” countercultural freedom, and its repercussions
• [53:20] – Colonial/post-colonial contexts, complicating Eurocentric perspectives on freedom
• [61:42] – Post-1990s: the ideological vacuum, filling by neoliberalism, new debates
• [67:15] – Enduring tensions between individual and collective freedom

Conclusion

Moritz Föllmer’s The Quest for Individual Freedom offers a subtle, multifaceted history of personal liberty in twentieth-century Europe, challenging tidy narratives of progress or decline. Instead, it reveals a persistent, sometimes productive tension: between the ordinary person’s quest to carve out autonomy and the collective projects—political, social, and economic—that shaped the century. This tension, as Föllmer argues, is not only central to European history but remains urgently relevant in today’s global debates over freedom, authority, and collective responsibility.